My name is Adam, I am working with some friends who are setting up a little business. They have asked me to see if I can have a go at designing a website for them, and while I have some very basic HTML and Flash concepts understood, I am very much a newbie and simply use logic and a lot of templates to get where I need to. The requirements of the site these guys are asking me to try are beyond what I understand and thought it was time to ask for some internet advice.

The step I am currently trying to figure out is a photo gallery that is embedded in my site, that has the ability to allow visitors to upload images.
The website is a place for builders to go and log details of repairing a house, and this includes photos of the work done. Ideally, the photo’s they upload will be attached to the “job” they are working on. Also ideally, the place they can upload and view images is not a separate page, it is embedded under a PHP form where they have filled out details of the job, then can attach photo’s underneath.

I have looked at some open source applications, and am trying them. The 1st I tried was http://www.plogger.org/ which seems to have installed easily and is working on a test site but does not seem to allow visitors to upload images, only view what the website admin has uploaded.
I am going to try http://gallery.menalto.com/ next but thought before I go too far I should post this and see if there are any better options to test.

Thanks for any advice, and any tips of a better category in the forum to ask such questions.

for what you need it would be simpler getting a programmer/developer to create a simple upload system, and a simple display routine that read the images in a directory on the server and displayed them on the appropriate page.

Applications such as Gallery and Coppermine are total overkill for what you need, and won't actually do what you want it to do.